Trading Places

from FaithWorld:

Wall Street woes prompt some to seek higher guidance

Wall Street's woes have prompted some to seek solace in an old stand by -- religion.

To read my colleague Christine Kearney's report on this trend, click here.

 Reverend Mark Bozzuti-Jones of Trinity Church Wall Street summed it up this way: "The economic financial crisis is a reminder that we cannot put our faith in riches, that we cannot put our faith in money."

(Photo Credit: REUTERS/Keith Bedford, March 21, 2008, UNITED STATES)

Weekend Roundup

Wall Street Journal: China Investment Corp. Wants You Job-seeking Wall Street types don’t have a lot of options. Cutbacks have eliminated tens of thousands of jobs. The number of investment banks narrows seemingly by the day. How about going to work for China? China Investment Corp., Beijing’s $200 billion sovereign wealth fund, is launching a new round of recruiting, aiming to fill more than 30 spots from macroeconomic research to stock picking.

The Guardian: Bidders raise hope for UK Lehman jobs Administrators of Lehman Brothers were racing last night to save up to 3,000 City jobs by selling the UK operations to potential bidders believed to include Barclays and Japan’s Nomura.

New York Magazine: Trickle-Down New York New York City’s proximity to extreme wealth—and the sense that New York has been fashioned by and for billionaires—is now at risk, along with the budgets of both the city and the state.

The Scotsman: HBoS chief pledges end staff uncertainty over jobs HALIFAX Bank of Scotland boss Andy Hornby today pledged to staff that he will end the uncertainty on jobs as soon as he can. In an open letter to staff, seen by the News, the Edinburgh-based firm’s chief executive admitted the merger with Lloyds TSB will “inevitably” lead to job cuts.

IT World: Financial industry turmoil: What’s in store for IT workers? “There’s clearly going to be a reshuffling of the deck” inside IT departments, says Marc Lewis, CEO of executive recruiter Leadership Capital Group (LCG). So far, the reshuffling of the deck is looking more like a collapsing house of cards.

Information Week: Wall Street Crisis Won’t Impact IT Jobs… At First The shock waves roiling the U.S. economy haven’t hit the IT job market yet, but high-tech specialists in demand today will still be in demand when the dust settles over the financial services markets, IT employment specialists maintain in an informal survey.

New York Times: New York’s Resilience Put to the Test After the recession of 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that New York City’s economy had diversified enough through the fostering of tourism, manufacturing and other businesses that the city had “reduced our dependency on the fortunes and failures of Wall Street.” Now, with the financial sector in turmoil after the failure of two of its biggest investment banks, the forced sale of another and the loss of thousands of its best-paying jobs, the mayor and his city face a true test of that claim.

Job Bank – Sep. 22

The following are job changes within the financial industry for September 22, linked where possible to profiles on LinkedIn.

NOMURA HOLDINGS The Japanese investment bank said James Lamb, Steven Ware, Kai Herbert, Sami Amara and Lofti Bensassi have joined its global foreign exchange sales and trading team in London. Herbert was previously from Bank of America, while the other four had worked at Bear Stearns.

GFI GROUP INC The inter-dealer broker added five new hires in emerging markets credit default swaps in New York. All five join GFI from BGC Partners.

DAVIS POLK & WARDWELL The law firm named former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner Annette Nazareth a partner in its Washington, D.C. office. She will practice in the firm’s Financial Institutions Group.

RAINIER INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT INC The investment firm hired Michael Emery as senior equity portfolio manager and analyst. He previously was vice president and small-cap portfolio manager with Provident Investment Counsel.

BROADPOINT CAPITAL INC The broker-dealer subsidiary of Broadpoint Securities Group Inc named Clay Stephens as Managing Director and Roger Weilep as Vice President of Investment Grade Sales Department of Broadpoint’s Debt Capital Markets Division. Stephens was previously with Bear Stearns and Weilep was with Deutsche Bank Securities.

Trade the unemployment rate

It might seem a safe bet that the number of people out of work in the U.S. will head higher in September following the job losses on Wall Street. But even if that’s the case, it won’t feed through to the unemployment rate immediately. That’s because to count as unemployed, respondents to a government survey of households who are out of work must say they have actively looked for work in the last four weeks. Alister Bull discussed the vagaries of the unemployment rate in this analysis.

There might be fewer economists on Wall Street to forecast the September number, but you can place a bet on whether the rate will rise from August’s five-year high of 6.1 percent via our news prediction game on Hubdub.com. Click on the live graph below to jump to the Reuters/Hubdub marketplace.

Wall Street job losses may be Asia’s gain

MUMBAI/SHANGHAI: Within hours of Bank of America agreeing to buy Merrill Lynch this week, Indian financial services firm Ambit hired five Merrill executives, a sign that Asia hopes to gain from massive Wall Street layoffs.

For China and India, whose economies are still expanding at well over 7 percent, the global financial industry crisis makes it easier to recruit bankers who are brushing off their resumes.

New York’s governor reckons 40,000 Wall Street jobs could go in a worst-case scenario, with talk swirling of more bank deals and mergers.

Lehman Brothers, which has filed for bankruptcy protection, has around 2,000 staff in India, including its back-office operation, while Merrill has about 500.

Ambit Holdings said on Monday it hired the five Merrill executives from a majority-owned local venture for its institutional equities and equity proprietary trading unit, including a 10-year Merrill veteran as head.

BNP Paribas and Nomura Securities in India are looking to hire Lehman executives, according to investment banking sources who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter. In Hong Kong, bankers said they were considering hiring from Lehman.

Lehman, AIG workers get one break in Chicago

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Employees of Lehman Brothers and insurance giant AIG looking to cry in their beer following a week of turmoil at the troubled companies can at least find a half-priced drink at one Chicago restaurant.

“Everybody is freaking out. We wanted to do something to make their day a little better,” said Scott Weiner, co-owner of The Fifty/50 restaurant that is offering half-off bar and restaurant tabs for anyone who can prove they work or worked for AIG or Lehman Brothers.

Lehman’s parent company filed for bankruptcy this week and AIG was bailed out by the U.S. government. In addition to job losses, the former’s stock traded for pennies while the latter was below $5 a share.

The offer is good Sunday through Thursday until October at the restaurant west of downtown Chicago. Weiner said 20 or 30 people, many of whom he had gotten to know while managing another restaurant frequented by employees of the financial companies, had already accepted the half-price discount.

August jobless rates up in most states, Michigan No. 1

WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Unemployment rates rose in most U.S. states in August, with Michigan again logging the highest rate of 8.9 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

Altogether, 44 states and the District of Columbia have recorded increases in jobless rates since July, with 24 states registering what the department deems “statistically significant” increases.

Rhode Island had the largest rise — up 3.4 percentage points — since August 2007. It also had the second-highest rate for the month at 8.5 percent. Illustrating how much the job landscape has changed since 2007, a total of 27 states and the District of Columbia posted over-the-year rate increases of 1.0 percentage point or more, the Labor Department said. South Dakota continued to be a bright spot, with the lowest unemployment rate of 3.3 percent in August.

Nationally, the unemployment rate stood at 6.1 percent in August. Since July, nonfarm payroll employment increased in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Louisiana added the most jobs at 9,400, followed by Texas with 6,800 jobs. Conversely, Georgia lost the most jobs at 26,200 — it lost nearly three times the amount of jobs that Louisiana gained — and recorded the largest month-on-month percentage drop of 0.6 percent.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Jan Paschal)

The Welches weigh in with advice for laid off bankers

Jack and Suzie Welch have some advice for Lehman and Merrill Lynch staffers, in their column for BusinessWeek:

Look, we’re not about to blithely tell Merrill’s roughly 60,000 employees and Lehman’s 22,000 to put on a happy face and get on with life. A massive earthquake just struck Wall Street; people will be reeling for a while.

But to the employees most directly affected, we are saying that you can’t reel too long. At Merrill, people need to quickly adopt a No Resistance Mind Set. And at Lehman, they need to act fast to avoid the Vortex of Defeat.

What, you never heard of the Vortex of Defeat?  Some quick Googling takes us to Jack and Suzie’s website, where we find that it’s a state “in which lack of self-confidence feeds upon itself in a downward spiral.”

So, you know, steer clear of that.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that

Wall Street clearly needs all the love it can get this week, which should make CNN feel a little less bad about getting pranked by radio host Howard Stern.

The New York Observer reports that it was longtime Stern Show regulars Richard Christy and Sal “The Stockbroker” Governale who made out with each other behind CNN’s Allan Chernoff, who obliviously conducted his live standup in front of the Lehman Brothers building.

Extra credit to the CNN host for taking the disruption in stride, and quickly segueing from her description of Christy and Governale “pretending to console each other” to the fact that “there were many reactions out there….”

Wall Street quakes shake New York social scene

NEW YORK, Sept 18 (Reuters) – New Yorkers who frequent Gotham’s most lavish parties fear the good times are over. The economic downturn of the past year left many of the city’s richest unscathed. But the swift demise of some of Wall Street’s most historic firms has erased immense wealth and challenged a sense of security for even the moneyed classes.

“It’s the end of an era,” said party-goer Melissa Berkelhammer at an event at New York’s Plaza Hotel this week. “Everything was going so sky high that everyone had to keep redefining what luxury was.”

The reality check may even affect the way the city’s top socialites appear in public, regardless of whether their own billions are safe.

“Being an unemployed heiress and going to a party and wearing a pretty dress is not the image people want to see right now,” said Remy Stern, founder of Cityfile.com, which profiles people it believes are the city’s most influential.

David Patrick Columbia, editor of the New York Social Diary website, which chronicles the city’s wealthiest and their satellites, said: “We’ve entered a hurricane, maybe combined with a monsoon and cyclone.”

“We save nothing, so we’re not at all prepared,” he said.

The turmoil on Wall Street has become the topic du jour among New York City’s movers and shakers, Stern said.